Ryan’s Daughter has its passionate defenders and plenty of detractors, and after seeing it for the first time, I’m not about to plant a flag and declare it one of David Lean’s masterpieces. What I will say is that they simply don’t make movies like this anymore.

It’s 1916 on Ireland’s Dingle Peninsula, where Rosy Ryan (Sarah Miles, Blow-Up), restless daughter of the local publican, marries widowed schoolmaster Charles Shaughnessy (Robert Mitchum, Out of the Past). Rosy expects romance and finds something considerably quieter. Then Major Doryan (Christopher Jones, Wild in the Streets), a shell-shocked British officer, arrives at the nearby garrison just as talk of Irish rebellion begins heating up. Leo McKern (The Omen) plays Rosy’s father, Trevor Howard (Brief Encounter) is the parish priest, and John Mills (Great Expectations) won an Oscar as Michael, the mute villager treated cruelly by nearly everyone around him.

This was Lean’s first film after Doctor Zhivago, and whatever problems anyone has with the drama, the physical scale of the production is staggering. The village of Kirrary was built from scratch using roughly 20,000 tons of local stone. Lean then waited close to a year for weather violent enough to stage the movie’s storm sequence, which second-unit director Roy Stevens finally captured at the Bridges of Ross.

Cinematographer Freddie Young shot the film in Super Panavision 70 and won his third Academy Award for the effort. Mitchum famously compared working with Lean to building the Taj Mahal out of matchsticks, and sitting through the finished film, you can understand exactly what he meant. Everything feels enormous. The landscapes stretch forever and even the weather becomes a character. Crowds, buildings and coastlines are allowed to fill the frame instead of becoming background decoration. Even when the story slows to a crawl, there’s nearly always something extraordinary to look at.

And yes, it is slow. At 206 minutes, Ryan’s Daughter asks for patience, and there are stretches where the romantic melodrama doesn’t justify every minute Lean gives it. Rosy’s longing is easy enough to understand, but the emotional temperature sometimes stays strangely cool for a movie this consumed with passion.

Mitchum may be the movie’s secret weapon. He strips away much of his usual screen danger and makes Charles a genuinely decent man, which complicates everything Rosy does far more than if he were simply a bad husband waiting to be escaped from. Miles gives Rosy the restless energy the story needs, while Jones is more effective physically than verbally. His dialogue was famously re-voiced by Julian Holloway, but Doryan’s trauma often registers most strongly in the moments when he doesn’t have to say anything. Then there’s Mills, whose aching performance earned the film one of its two Oscars. Michael is written in ways that can feel uncomfortable through a modern lens, but Mills gives him a vulnerability that keeps him from becoming only a village eccentric.

Critics were brutal in 1970. Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert were among those who tore into it, and Lean wouldn’t complete another feature for 14 years, finally returning  to success with A Passage to India. Watching Ryan’s Daughter now, I kept thinking less about the reviews and more about what it must have been like to see this as a roadshow presentation, with overture, intermission and a giant screen inside one of those ornate movie palaces that has since become apartments, retail space or a parking lot.

The film may not be peak Lean, but the filmmaking is huge, handmade and almost recklessly ambitious. You can argue all you want about Ryan’s Daughter in comparison to Lean’s other work. It’s much harder not to be impressed by it.